Sunday, August 6, 2017

Michelle Carter is free, awaiting the appeal of her
conviction for involuntary manslaughter. You know all about this case. The
seventeen year old girl nudged, pushed, influenced, induced her sometime boyfriend,
Conrad Roy to kill himself by gassing himself within a vehicle. And she did it all via text messages.

Carter encouraged Roy to commit suicide. He had told her that he wanted to do it. He had planned out how to do it. She suggested that he man up and go through with it. She promised that it would free him of
his pain. When he wanted to escape the gas chamber he created, she told him to
get back into the car.

He did as she said. But, does that make her words a weapon?
Was it equivalent to shouting “Fire” in a crowded theatre? Does that make her a
killer? Has anyone considered that seventeen-year-olds have a deficient moral sense?

Aside for what this tells us about girl power, one notes
that Carter did not hypnotize Roy and did not bewitch him. Nevertheless, she is
being treated very much like a witch… a woman who cast a spell on a man, did him grievous harm and who
deserves to be punished.

But, what would happen if she had told him to kill himself
and he did not go through with it? Would that make her guilty of attempted
manslaughter or even attempted homicide? Since manslaughter seems to refer to
crimes committed in the heat of passion and since Carter was fully aware of
what she was doing, why wasn’t she charged with murder? Again, if Roy had not
committed suicide, would she have been charged with attempted murder?Obviously, this would put the first amendment into a deep chill. It would open you up to prosecution every time you told someone to: Drop dead!

Carter was tried and convicted by a judge. She chose not to
have a jury trial. Now, the general opinion, from the American Civil Liberties
Union to the National Review agrees that she was unjustly convicted. On several
different grounds, all of them worth our consideration.

Mr.
Roy's death is a terrible tragedy, but it is not a reason to stretch the
boundaries of our criminal laws or abandon the protections of our constitution.

There
is no law in Massachusetts making it a crime to encourage someone, or even to
persuade someone, to commit suicide. Yet Ms. Carter has now been convicted of
manslaughter, based on the prosecution's theory that, as a 17-year-old girl,
she literally killed Mr. Roy with her words. This conviction exceeds the limits
of our criminal laws and violates free speech protections guaranteed by the
Massachusetts and U.S. Constitutions.

Writing in National Review, David French noted that Conrad
Roy took his own life. He did it of his own volition, freely.

French wrote:

First,
Conrad Roy is responsible for his death. To argue that Carter committed
manslaughter is to diminish Roy’s moral agency. It denies his free
will. It’s wrong to deny compassion to someone so troubled that they’d
attempt suicide, but we can’t move so far in the other direction that we
race to find who’s “really” to blame when a person
voluntarily takes their own life. It’s still an act of self-murder, and while
Carter undoubtedly played a persuasive role, I can’t imagine where we will draw
the line. Will we prosecute mean people for manslaughter when troubled
teens kill themselves?

Carter’s
actions were reprehensible, but she was sharing with him thoughts and
opinions that he may have found persuasive but had the capacity to reject.
A legal argument that renders otherwise-protected speech unlawful because
it actually persuades would blast a hole in First Amendment
jurisprudence.

If
“free will” is to mean anything, you cannot “suicide” a person to death. You
can murder someone, you can accidentally murder someone, you can pay someone to
murder someone for you, you can set up a criminal organization under which
murders occur on your behalf, you can even set up conditions so inherently
unsafe that you are criminally responsible for anybody who happens to die. But
you can’t kill a person who kills themselves. The self-killing breaks the
causal chain between your actions, however reprehensible, and the death.

Apparently, Carter was mean to Roy. And yet, she did not
force him to do what he did:

Carter’s
texts to her then-boyfriend were undoubtedly mean. Abusive even. She encouraged
him to kill himself, believing, she claims, that he really wanted to do it and
that he would be happier in heaven if he did. She also called him on his cell
phone, encouraging him to go through with it. Allegedly, at one point Roy got
out of his car and Carter told him to get back in.

Carter
was not disturbing the peace. She was not inciting a riot. She didn’t push him
into the car and lock the door. She didn’t turn on the gas. She didn’t threaten
to kill him if he didn’t do it himself. She told him that if he wanted to kill
himself that he absolutely should.

Mystal concluded:

The
prosecution of Michelle Carter clearly isn’t about justice. It’s about revenge
and deterrence. We want to punish Carter because her texts were so mean, and we
want to warn teens not to bully each other online because there will be
consequences. Convicting someone for texting a man to death is a perverse
miscarriage of justice, but if it stops one teen from body-shaming a fellow
teen on Instagram, most parents will be cool with the conviction.

Mystal said that Carter was a mean bitch. Close, but no cigar. But, he was only off by one letter. He should have seen that the prosecution was about hunting down and punishing
witches. This is Massachusetts, after all.

6 comments:

Progressives are very superstitious. The popularity of frauds like "Starhawk" and her ilk testify to this.

This case is but one example of the weird belief that words and images can direct the forces of nature and human behavior. Carter's conviction is no different in kind from the NYT's assertion that Sarah Palin's political imagery "caused" the Giffords shooting.

MA is perhaps the most Progressive state in America, and it is no coincidence the it was also the jurisdiction responsible for the Fells Acres miscarriage of justice. Fells Acres caus ed a national hysteria and popularized the bizarre persecutions of child care workers using therapists to discern "magic rooms" and "secret" subterranean cells to perform ritualistic sexual abuse of preschoolers.

Peter Breggin has written about this case and believes that Carter is a victim and the media has sensationalized the story. Psychiatric drugs improperly given to the suicide victim and Carter might be a factor. From what I read, Carter may have been severely depressed herself. Breggin has promised to continue researching this.It looks like a modern day witch hunt. After all, this is happening in Mass. The article is at breggin.com

Its certainly fair to call this assisted suicide, even if not manslaughter. Laws vary by state. My state of Minnesota is more specific where you can get 7 years, even if the person fails in killing themselves. Obviously the first rule of assisting suicide is to not leave evidence behind!

http://www.patientsrightscouncil.org/site/assisted-suicide-state-laws/Massachusetts Common law is based on principles, customs and case law, rather than on a specific statute.---Minnesota Minn. Stat. § 609.215Aiding suicide: Whoever intentionally advises, encourages, or assists another in takingthe other’s own life may be sentenced to imprisonment for not more than 15 years or to payment of a fine of not more than $30,000, or both.andAiding attempted suicide: Whoever intentionally advises, encourages, or assists another who attempts but fails to take the other’s own life may be sentenced to imprisonment for not more than seven years or to payment of a fine of not more than $14,000, or both.---